Curb Emotional Eating in Your Familywith These Four Tips

How to stop overeating and promote
healthy living

The stressful day-to-day activities associated with contemporary lifestyles can often have serious impacts on
our emotional health. Over-eating, otherwise known as 'emotional eating,' is often a symptom of underlying stress
and instability in one's personal life. The progression of emotional eating can occur naturally through one's daily
schedule, where down-time consists of inactivity in front of the television snacking on unhealthy treats. Food is a
common form of comfort for many, along with relieving stress or justification as a 'reward,' on a regular basis
this habit can cause serious health concerns down the track.

Keep your fridge door closed, other than when it's needed for preparing family
meals

Witnessing family members undergo this transformation is difficult to comprehend, and reaching out to offer
assistance can easily be met with hostility or resentment. These four tips will help you and your family members
come to terms with this hazardous lifestyle, and provide guidance on how to best approach the situation.

1. Establish a Healthy Home Environment

The easy accessibility of junk food is a key factor in contributing towards emotional eating. Snacks such as
chips, chocolate, candy, lollies and soft drink, are very common household items that can easily accumulate through
regular consumption and purchasing. Changing the buying habits of all family members will help introduce positive
eating lifestyles for all individuals.

Common substitutes that can be utilized to replace junk food items include low-fat yogurt, un-buttered popcorn,
rice crackers, low-fat dips and an assortment of fruits and vegetables.

Contributions and effort from all family members will help produce a more positive attitude to healthy eating,
which may be tarnished if not everyone is on the same page.

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well.

2. Provide Distractions

Avoid the temptation of opening the fridge and trying to curb your emotional
distress with food

Over-eating is often a symptom of boredom or disinterest in other activities. With easy accessibility to
hand-held devices, laptops, desktop computers and gaming consoles, solving boredom through stationary involvement
in technology is more prevalent than ever. While not an unhealthy lifestyle choice in itself, combined with
emotional eating habits, it can provide a recipe for disaster.

Encouraging outdoor activities that involves the whole family is the
perfect solution to getting people out of the house and getting active. Whether it's partaking in sport,
photography, camping, or bike riding, plan days out that involve everyone participating in activities they
like.

If outdoor entertainment is not always a viable solution, pursuing of hobbies and personal interests is another
endeavour that decreases reliance upon food to fulfil those empty spaces. Engrossing one's self in engaging
activities exercises not only the mind, but utilizes previously stored energy, which allows for more restful sleep
and more consistent sleeping patterns.

Regardless of whether these interests are physically active, as long as the
mind is deviated away from the constant thought of food, it provides a positive step in the right direction.

3. Maintain a Daily Journal

Writing down your thoughts and emotions is a healthy step towards identifying factors that influence emotional
eating habits. If you find yourself craving food, even when not actually hungry, collect your thoughts and process
them onto paper. Describe the kind of food that you crave and how much you particularly desire. This will provide a
connective framework between the thought processes that lead to your actions of eating, by identifying the
correlation between your emotions and the types of food associated with those thoughts.

Include more fruits and vegetables in your family meals, which will promote
healthier living and reduce binge eating.

4. Reward Successful Progression

With the combination of dietary and lifestyle choices being implemented into a strategy to combat emotional
eating, it is important to reward good behaviour when progress is made. If a family member opts for fruit over
chocolate, acknowledge their shift in attitude with positive comments and appraisal. By implementing short-term
rewards over a long stretch of time, the road towards recovering becomes much more realistic and achievable among
individuals. Sharing success with others is another encouraging attitude to display, as it promotes healthy living between all family members.

With the number of tips and methods available to those who want to encourage healthy eating among their family,
promoting alternative options to traditional junk food is a great way to boost energy and lift people's spirits.
Family members wishing to change the habits of their peers, will make the changes themselves.